


City of ghosts

by irisdouglasiana



Series: The gods will always smile on brave women [2]
Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergent, F/M, an overabundance of metaphors, you fix your own fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 08:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16014281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: From the beginning, Freydis is already thinking about the end.





	City of ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> CW: miscarriage.
> 
> Everything about this relationship is going to be problematic and I fully expect to be completely contradicted by canon when 5b comes out, but, you know, fuck it.

From the beginning, Freydis is already thinking about the end. She had started to let herself believe that he had forgotten her, after York—if she had been wise, she would have taken her freedom and never returned to Kattegat, to this city of ghosts—but one cold autumn evening in the great hall, she feels his eyes come to settle on the back of her head and travel down her body, and she cannot stop herself. She turns around to meet his gaze. After that, it is too late for her; the conclusion is forgone.

What men will tell you is that power is a sword, a ship, an army. What Freydis knows is that power is a word whispered in the ear, a touch on the arm, a smile. And that is why she is not afraid of Ivar, who, blessed by the gods though he may be, is still a man. She knows it when she comes to his bed for the first time and he looks up at her with desire and defiance in his eyes, almost daring her to say something. She thinks he is afraid she will look at his naked body and laugh, or go and whisper to the other women after the deed is done. He is acutely aware that his body has forever been a source of speculation and mockery. Down by the river scrubbing clothes or plucking a hen in the kitchen, the slaves gossiped endlessly about him, especially after rumors spread that he had choked a slave girl when he had been unable to please her. Ivar, above all things, had the need to prove himself a man.

Yet it is not the act itself that it is important, but what Ivar understands a man to be, and that is something that she can mold as she wishes without him even realizing it. Ivar does not even know enough to know what he likes. She has spent her entire conscious life as a slave; she learned from a very early age how to anticipate her masters’ needs before they did, and that skill serves her well. This is her power, to understand Ivar better than he understands himself, and it will always elude him. From time to time, he may be able to make out the shape of it, like a shadow on the wall, but when he tries to take it in his hands, he finds there is nothing to hold on to. 

* * *

He sends her a gift that nearly causes her heart to stop in her chest when she unwraps it: a necklace, hammered out of gold, with a delicate pendant in the shape of a wheel. A chariot wheel, she thinks, as she holds it up to the light. It is much heavier than it looks.

“You must have a care,” Ingrid tells her, touching the necklace gingerly. Ingrid is the only slave who will still speak to Freydis; all the others look away when she walks by, gazing at her with resentment. Freydis supposes she would have done the same. But Ingrid has been like a mother to her for all these years, and if she resents her now, Freydis cannot tell. “He draws you to him like a moth to the fire. All you see is the light and all you feel is heat, and you forget what he really is. In the end, he will burn you. That is his nature; he cannot help it.”

“I will not forget,” she promises. She carefully wraps the necklace back in the cloth it came in and hides it in a safe place. To put it around her neck would be like saying she is Ivar’s woman; that she, like Kattegat, is his possession, his prize. And she is a free woman. She belongs to herself and no one else.

* * *

Sometimes, after they have sex, he will lie beside her and the words will tumble out of him. His mind jumps from one subject to the next; his mood shifting in an instant. Stories from his childhood, mostly, all colored with resentment and loneliness. “When I was small,” begins one such story, “I quarreled with my brother Sigurd, and he took away my toy boat that Floki made for me and put it somewhere I could see but not reach. I hit him until Ubbe pulled me off him and they ran outside. And I looked and saw my father watching us from his throne.” His expression suddenly twists with grief. “I never meant to kill Sigurd,” he says. He stares up at the ceiling, lost in himself.

Freydis had not been there when Ivar killed his brother; she had been in the kitchen tending to the fire when she heard the shouting outside. Afterwards, she and Ingrid and Thyra had spent hours scrubbing the blood out of the table so it would not be ruined, but they could not remove the stain. Maybe Ivar is telling the truth when he says he did not mean to kill his brother, and maybe he is sorry, but what of it? He threw the axe anyway.

That, of course, is not what he wants her to say. What he wants is for her to say it was not really his fault; that his brother had provoked him and tormented him and there was nothing else he could do. “It was the will of the gods,” she says, squeezing his hand. She feels him relax infinitesimally, and all of a sudden, he is sobbing in her arms. He gasps for breath like a drowning man.

This is at night. In the morning, she watches him put on his armor and become somebody else, adjusting the straps on his braces and heaving himself to his feet. He will come back at the end of the day with his back soaked with sweat and his legs trembling, but nobody knows that but her. The slaves all shrink from his cold gaze. They are terrified that he will turn his attention to them, and they are right to be afraid; he does not hesitate to make an example out of those who displease him. No one, slave or free man, dares cross him now, or sniggers when he drags himself around.

One time, his foot catches and he falls as he slowly makes his way to his throne, and the entire great hall goes completely silent. He quickly picks himself up and says nothing of it, but that evening, he sulks and rages at her and nothing she says or does can alter his mood. He is embarrassed that he fell, but more than that, he cannot afford to show any trace of weakness. There is no margin of error for a king who came to power the way he did. He believes his enemies are lurking around every corner, even though his rivals have been vanquished and his banners drape the great hall. He will lounge about in the chair that was once his father’s, seemingly perfectly at ease, but his eyes are forever roaming, forever watching, forever restless.

* * *

Her body begins to thicken in the spring as the snow thaws and the sun returns. The rivers run high with snowmelt and tender green shoots poke through the soil, and her breasts swell and her feet swell and her dresses grow tighter and tighter. Everywhere she turns, there is life. The families and the merchants and the farmers have come back to Kattegat now that the war is over, and more will come in time. Within the city, the skeletons of the buildings that burned in the last battle have finally been pulled down and the scraps sifted through, and the men are out in the forest felling trees so they can rebuild.

Inside the trunk of each tree, she imagines there is a hidden shape, something that has yet to take form. Perhaps it will become the beam that supports the roof of a sturdy new house, or the frame of a loom, or the handle of an axe. Perhaps it will be carved into the prow of the ship that sails to the very edges of the earth, beyond what anybody thought possible. For the moment, its true destiny is still buried deep within the grain of the wood, waiting to emerge.

“My mother had the gift of prophecy,” Ivar says one evening as he lies beside Freydis, idly stroking her belly. “She dreamed that she would give birth to a monster. Do you carry a monster within you too?”

A monster. She can picture it in her mind; a clump of feathers and fur, or a creature with teeth and claws and a tail slithering out of her. That, she is certain, was not what Ivar had been when he was born: just a baby with misshapen legs and fragile bones, red-cheeked and bawling like any infant, clinging ferociously to life. He only became a monster later. “He will be whatever shape it pleases the gods to make him,” she tells Ivar. “He will be my child.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “Or she,” he grins, surprising her. “We will know soon enough.” It does not escape her notice how easily that word slips out of him. _We_.  

But they will never know. One moment she is perfectly fine, out in the hills searching for mushrooms, and in the next she is seized by a jolt of pain, as if an invisible hand has taken her womb and squeezed. She sinks to the ground and the blood runs down between her thighs and stains her dress and it doesn’t _stop_ , it just keeps coming and coming—

Later, she has only vague memories of what happened afterwards and how she found her way back to the great hall. She does recall Ingrid’s worried face hovering above her, and Sigrunn the midwife shaking her head, and Ivar is there too, looking pale and stricken. “You will live, girl,” Freydis hears Ingrid whisper, her nails digging into her palm. “If you die, I will follow you to the next world and drag you back.”

She does not die, but in the weeks that follow, she sometimes thinks it would be easier if she had. Ingrid is with her every day to make sure she eats and drinks, and Freydis hates her for it, even though she knows she shouldn’t. Ivar never comes to see her. He has gone to England to raid and continue his quest for revenge against Lagertha and his brothers, Ingrid says. The older woman knows well enough to say nothing against him, but she presses her lips together in fury at the mention of his name. Freydis, however, is secretly glad for his absence; only when he is gone does she begin to understand how he has left her hollowed out and exhausted. It will always be this way with him. He does not love her, will never love her, cannot love her. Maybe she has known it all along.

When he does return to Kattegat months later, heaving himself over the side of the ship onto the dock, Freydis stands among the crowd and watches him as he looks around. Their eyes meet briefly, and then, for once, he looks away.

* * *

The seer turns his head when she steps through the door, and he bares his teeth in a grin. “I have been expecting you for a long time.”

“You must forgive me for not coming sooner, Wise One.” She sits down on the floor, takes out the bundle she has been carrying under her cloak, and gives him the necklace Ivar gave her.

He turns it around in his hands and feels out each link in the gold chain before returning it. “A fine gift you have been given. Or is it a curse? You see, I grow tired of those who come to ask me questions, forever fretting over their fates. But you, I think, come with answers, so tonight, let me be the one to question.

“Now: some call you Ivar’s woman.” He pauses, and there again is that wolfish grin. His teeth are filed into points. “Or Ivar’s whore. Some say you have bewitched him. Others whisper that you are a princess in disguise. Which are you?”

Without thinking, she spreads her hands apart, before realizing that she is imitating Ivar’s gesture; at any rate, the seer cannot see it. She drops her hands. “If I were a princess,” she says dryly, “one would think that Ivar would have married me already and made me his queen. Or that I would have enchanted him into doing so by using my powers as a witch.”

“Ah, well. But you must admit it is a good story,” the seer chuckles. “Then who are you really, child?”

She smiles back. “I am Freydis, and my mother was called Helle. She was a slave. I have never known my father. But I think you know these things already.” As for what she is to Ivar, well—she is unsure how to name the space between them, especially now. _Do you know who I am?_ he asked her that first time, and of course she knew, but he has never bothered to ask who _she_ is. It is not the sort of question that would occur to him. 

The seer sniffs the air and nods, and for a moment, she wonders if he can read her thoughts. “He fears you.”

Freydis nearly laughs; it is so absurd. “That is not possible.”

“Who are you to say what is not possible, hm?” he asks irritably. “Would you not have said, before, that it was impossible that you should be a free woman?”

She is silent for a moment, remembering York, and Ivar’s eyes boring into her naked back as she dressed herself. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him still staring at her, his face mired with confusion. She wonders how long he sat there after she left him and walked outside into the light, into freedom. “So the gods have revealed this to you?” she presses.

“Do they have to?” he rasps. “What do you fear, girl?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she spies a moth hovering around a candle, circling closer and closer to the flame. How does it not know the danger; how does it not see? Her voice is frozen in her throat. The seer laughs and snuffs out the candle, and the moth flutters away unharmed. “You have tasted freedom and found it to your liking. You are afraid that you will lose some measure of it to him. Or that you already have. Would you know yet more?”

Her voice suddenly cracks. “Why did the gods take my child?”

“I do not know,” he says. His tone is almost gentle. “You cannot change what the gods have willed. But let me tell you two things: it was neither your fault nor his that it happened, and you will survive this. You will survive because you are Freydis, daughter of Helle, and you fix your own fate.” He holds out his palm.

* * *

In high summer in Kattegat, the days stretch on for forever. When the work is finished for the evening, the slaves tie a length of rope between two trees and take turns walking it, letting out a collective groan when someone falls. Freydis sits on the dock some ways away and watches. The sea is perfectly calm today, flat and clear as a mirror, but she breaks the illusion when she casts off her shoes and slides her feet into the cold water, sending ripples outward.

She turns her head when she hears Ivar crawling up behind her. “I did that, as a girl,” she says, pointing to the slave walking the tightrope. She had been the best at it. They would raise the rope higher and higher for her until she was three feet off the ground, her arms stretched out and her back perfectly straight as she felt her way along the rope with her feet. Even if some of the boys jostled the rope, she kept her balance. The trick to not falling, she tells Ivar, was to block out the voices of the spectators and keep her gaze fixed in front of her, and to not look down. Others fell because they looked and saw they could fall, and it made them hesitate and forget what was ahead of them.

She doesn’t know why she feels compelled to tell him this, but he sits beside her and listens. When she is finished, he sags against her, his shoulder brushing hers, and she knows the seer was right after all. “I thought you would die,” he says in a low voice. “I thought you would leave.”

Chin up. Eyes forward. Never look down. “I’m staying,” she says.

Later, after he is gone, she goes to her hiding place, takes the necklace out of the cloth, and hangs it around her neck. It is warm to the touch.


End file.
